The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling on the one hand, there is something age-old – perhaps eternal – to be investigated here, the image of the abode of the human being in the maternal womb . . . [O]n the other hand . . . we must understand dwelling in its most extreme form . . . The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occu-pant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell.
Walter Benjamin
The surrealists were positioned in opposition to modern architecture, as reflected in well-known public disagreements between André Breton and Le Corbusier. As Anthony Vidler explains in The Architectural Uncanny, the sur-realists had argued against the sterile “overrationalized technological realism” of modern building.1 Breton instead envisioned more habitable architecture, one which surrealist members Tristan Tzara and Matta Eschaur-ren elaborated and described in the eclectic journal Minotaure during the 1930s. In 1933 Tzara wrote against modern aesthetics that deny human
dwelling in favor of architecture with intrauterine appeal.2He called for a new serenity of “prenatal comfort” ushered in by the qualities of “soft tactile depths” experienced inside “circular, spherical, and irregular houses.”3From a “cave” or “tomb” in the “hollows of the earth,” Tzara believed “health”
could be restored in the realm of “luxury, calm and voluptuousness.”4 Sim-ilarly, in 1938 Matta argued for a folded body wrapping architecture of “wet walls” and “appetizing” “furniture” that fit with “molded profile” our “infi-nite motions” according to “life intensity” as “umbilical cords” “like plastic psychoanalytic mirrors.”5 He envisioned architecture that could “get out of shape” to “fit our psychological fears,” and relieve “the body of all the weight of . . . [its] right-angle past.”6Matta had described a provocative surre-alist project, which sought to create alloplastic architecture modulating to the infinite transformations of the body in motion.7Unconscious sensual desires could be forever satiated with flexible architectural skins moving in response to our every need. For Tzara and Matta non-rectilinear houses embodied sur-realist architecture – one which the Austrian-American architect Frederick Kiesler had been well on the way to developing.8Kiesler’s now well-known Endless project, since its inception between 1924 and 1926, served to nurture the dweller inside an embryonic casing of eggshell construction, and eventually, as the design developed, inside the cave-like bodily expression of intrauterine digestion. As the surrealist artist Hans Arp describes, “in [Kiesler’s] egg, in these spheroid egg-shaped structures, a human being can now take shelter and live as in his mother’s womb.”9
The egg
Kiesler presented the first model of his egg-shaped concept at the New York International Theater Exposition held at Steinway Hall in 1926. He had already become well known for his successful European avant-garde theater exhibitions in Vienna and Paris in 1924 and 1925. And upon invitation by Jean Heap of the Little Review, Kiesler had moved to New York with his wife Steffi to coordinate and present European avant-garde theater to America.
At the exhibition Kiesler unveiled his Endless Theater project designed to accommodate various sporting, parking, and theater facilities for up to 100,000 people.10His plans showed multiple open platforms suspended with elastic cables encased within a double shell, glass and steel, spheroid-matrix shaped structure upon which images and films could be projected.11 The theater was to be built without columns using glassy balloon materials so that interaction between actors and spectators could circulate freely – almost automatically – along spiral ramps and stairs.12Kiesler presented his vision for
mobile-flexible architecture designed to respond to the drama of the event – the motion of the crowd. “We must have organic building,” Kiesler describes,
“elasticity of building adequate to the elasticity of living.”13
Unable to realize his theater project, Kiesler developed varied archi-tectural interests for several years, but chose to return to his egg-shaped concept in the 1930s. In 1933 Kiesler exhibited a full-scale prototype of his egg-shaped structure called the Space House for the Modernage Furniture Company in New York. Kiesler’s Space House emphasized the use of a new structural principle – continuous tension shell construction.14Kiesler published his description of the house in Hounds & Horn magazine in March 1934. He divided the article into three parts: the social requirements of the house, the tectonic solutions to achieve those requirements, and the structural techno-logy used for building the exterior shell.
In the social realm Kiesler insists housing should support relation-ships between family and groups, but must also provide for “complete seclu-sion,” “physical separation,” “privacy,” and even “semi-seclusion.”15 The Space House ideally provides introverted living for every member of the household, and, as Kiesler remarks, it
must act as a generator for the individual. His generated forces are to be discharged to the outer world. The outer world: his own family or any outer group. The house is built on this two-way prin-ciple: charging and discharging through a flexibility that is contract-ing and expandcontract-ing.16
10.1
Painted collage by Frederick Kiesler over images of Space House (1933) and Endless Theater
(1924–1926) From “Frederick Kiesler, Architecture as Biotechnique,”
Architectural Record, September 1939, p. 67 (1940)
For Kiesler the house serves to charge the individuals energy forces for dis-charge back into the external world. As Kiesler represents in a series of unpublished notes and sketches on the Space House, his concept of contrac-tion converts the house over time to provide a sense of security through indi-vidual space enclosures that then can expand to provide for group interactions and ultimately outer world experiences. He anticipates time can be a factor in the use of the house, where the building can transform in accord to the needs of varied events.17
Kiesler argues the house functions through an organic machina-tion of metabolic processes where the “individual passing through time” is
“subjected to two forces; Anabolism: building up; Catabolism: breaking down.”18 Kiesler believes that within all objects, whether animate or inani-mate, there is a constant exchange of these two categories of mutating forces integrating and disintegrating at low rates of speed.19His architecture
10.2
Frederick Kiesler, diagram of metabolic processes within his Space House project, 1933
is modeled on molecular processes he describes as “nuclear-multiple forces,” which fuse together and pull apart subjects and objects in time.20As the individual, he suggests, passes horizontally to the world outside, verti-cally into the inner-world, paraboliverti-cally to work, and spheriverti-cally for play, the house interacts and exchanges forces with the dweller. This is achieved, he says, through the “the mobile space enclosure, and the individual as qualified by it.”21“This expansion and contraction is the propensity of the house,” he argues, and “it is achieved” tectonically through a series of movable parti-tions, rubber curtains, varying floor-levels, and rolling and sliding walls.22 Kiesler intends the “whole house to be one living room” of “static-flexibility”
that can adjust as needed.23 The house is not to be fixed in time but is intended to transform to the needs of human dwelling keyed to the changing and evolving necessities of the inhabitant.
Kiesler’s design for his Space House project sought to envelop dwelling within a mobile-flexible architecture that served to cultivate the body in coordination to daily habits. It could charge and discharge one’s energy forces geared to interactions of work, rest, or play. The house engaged the body physically – tactilely, and its form took shape in correlation to everyday use. The house was intended to move in response to the body with seamless organic expression. “Stream-lining becomes here an organic force,” Kiesler describes, “as it relates the dynamic equilibrium of body-motion within encompassed space.”24 The “proprio-spatial dynamic” func-tion of the house, he argues, is its ability to seam together complex components into one physically and visually elastic space.25
Touch and vision are essential to the dynamic function of the house. Published in a series of images in Architectural Record, Kiesler presents a shoe subtly applying pressure to an elastic sponge rubber carpet or a scissor tearing through the veil of a net fabric ceiling.26William Braham suggests in his article “What’s Hecuba to Him? On Kiesler and the Knot,” that these fabrics are “the most architectural realization of the surrealist project into which Kiesler, the traveler, was about to be initiated.”27In the Space House Kiesler uses materials to envelop the habitant in tactile protective layers, which provide varied function to facilitate “sound proofing,” “isolation,” and
“vision.”28Kiesler’s materials serve as screens that could be drawn to veil or be pulled back to reveal the outside world. Kiesler recognizes that materials have “psycho-functions” that can be utilized to stimulate the psyche.29 As Beatriz Colomina presents in her article, “De psyche van het bouwen: Freder-ick Kiesler’s Space House,” the erotic “sensuality of Kiesler’s house extends from touch into the visual freedom the design affords and beyond into the psyche.”30As Kiesler’s sketch of this concept expresses, the sensing terres-trial body is surrounded in a world of objects with arrows and lines that all
inter-relate and establish a perceptual boundary of the “stellar spectra.”31Kiesler’s architecture attempts to entice perception to pass through the tactile senses through the psyche and then beyond to outer space.
The Space House provides a perceptual boundary or semi-permeable shell that can respond to inner needs while at the same time resist external pressures. The structural “outer shell” of the house is intended to facilitate the flux and flow of physical and psychical force. It acts like a cellular membrane that provides “flexible division between outdoor and indoor.”32 It is “not a wall,” Kiesler remarks, but instead provides glass panels for optic contact, movable-glass for physical contact and terraces for extensity.33 Its overall structure is modeled on the concept of an eggshell, which Kiesler argues is the most “exquisite example we know of utmost resistance to outer and inner stress with a minimum of strength.”34 The house is to be unified into one viable protective tensile skin that can provide shelter, enclosure, and floor without conflict of interaction or use between parts. Continuous tension shell structures would not have joints that are subject to dis-joint. Instead their elastic nature and cellular structure would resist fracture or decay. Kiesler was well aware, however, that the techno-logy to construct his vision was not yet available: “There is no question: a new construction method has not yet been reached. We are in transition,”
he said, “from conglomeration to simplification.”35
Correalism and biotechnique
In 1936 Kiesler received an appointment as an associate professor at Colum-bia University School of Architecture and established his Laboratory for Design-Correlation. In the laboratory Kiesler and his students researched elasticity as a spatial and technological building concept through the design of home furniture. They advanced an interest in time and motion and developed a theory of Biotechnique as inspired by the work of Sir Patrick Geddes. Kiesler published his findings in a series of articles in Architectural Record in the 1930s.
Kiesler founded his theory of biotechnique based on architecture of environmental technology that sought to incorporate human needs into flexible built form for the benefit of human health. Health is central to Kiesler’s discourse as it had been for Tzara. In 1939 Kiesler declared that
Architecture . . . can only be judged by its power to maintain and enhance man’s well being – physical and mental. Architecture thus becomes a tool for the control of man’s health, its de-generation and re-de-generation.36
For Kiesler, architecture is a tool for controlling the de-generation and re-generation of man’s physical and psychical being. As Kiesler describes, archi-tecture provides a physical environment that can adapt to mitigate
“maladjustments by protection against fatigue (preventive) and by relief of fatigue (curative).”37 It is Kiesler’s intention to create architecture that will bring the body into harmony with the technological environment in order “to maintain the equilibrium of its health.”38
In designing this new architecture of biotechnique his students made extensive observations of the body in its relation to objects of every-day use. They relied on time-motion studies similar in intent to those invented by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, which were then later advanced by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. Seeking a “proper balance” between the forces of expending and replacing energy Kiesler aims to achieve “optimum efficiency.”39 However, unlike Fordist practice that attempts to mold the body to the demands of an efficient technological mechanized work force, Kiesler searched to develop a technology that might adapt to the needs of an evolutionary process of socio-economic changes.40 From “deficiency” to “efficiency” Kiesler charts how “actual needs are not the direct incentive to technological and socio-economic changes,” instead he argues that “needs are not static: they evolve.”41 Kiesler sought to develop a typology of organic architecture – a living machine – designed to modulate to man’s motion in time counter to Le Corbusier’s vision of the home as a machine for living.42
Kiesler believed architecture could be built organically in contra-distinction to techniques used to construct the modern box. He resisted machine-fastened panel and frame construction represented by the work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. And he wildly departed from the Inter-national Style with his spheroid-shaped eggshell structures and palpable-tactile interiors that stimulated psychical experiences. In support of biomorphic architecture, Kiesler idealized elastic spaces held together in con-tinuous tension and found inspiration for his structural concept in Marcel Duchamp’s “Big Glass.”
In his essay on glass pictures published in Architectural Record in 1937, Kiesler argues that Duchamp’s sculpture appears structurally similar to a leaf; it holds together varied suspended elements floating within a frame-work of tensional fillings, both elastic and interdependent.43The glass pro-vides porosity and protection; it is visually transparent while at the same time appearing to resist fracture and decomposition – without relying on typical joinery techniques. Kiesler’s interpretation of the “Big Glass” was regarded highly by Duchamp, who facilitated Kiesler’s association with the official sur-realist group.
Surrealist galleries
Receiving respect and understanding from within the surrealist circle, Kiesler was invited to design the 1942 Art of This Century Gallery exhibition in New York for Peggy Guggenheim. He designed displays, lighting, and furniture for four different gallery exhibitions. Kiesler’s chairs designed for the varied spaces exemplified ideas explored in the Design-Correlation laboratory. His chairs made of plywood and linoleum transform to the evolving body in motion; they are manufactured for several different seating or standing poses and bear striking similarity to the surrealist sketch of Matta Echaur-ren’s chairs published in Minotaure, 1938. Movement – the body in motion – is a central theme explored throughout Kiesler’s work. And while Kiesler’s chairs attempt to pre-figure and inspire possible gesture and movement, modulated to future conditions, his exhibition designs used imagery and lighting effects to consciously stimulate and unconsciously motivate the body and mind to wander. As Edgar Kaufmann Jr. remarks in his review of The Art of This Century Surrealist Gallery, the “viewer . . . [is] led around the room by the eye, and shown objects singly, but in no special sequence.”44 The viewer passes through the space between two continuously curved plywood shells over and under the looming plywood ceiling and sinuous linoleum floor. Pulsating lights are intended to move in rhythmic distracting succession to focus concentrated attention upon the individual images while a roaring sound of an approaching train is heard in the background. “It’s dynamic, it pulsates like your blood,” Kiesler describes.45 “Geometrically severe” art is often displayed in Kiesler’s post impressionist exhibition designs with a “distracting jumble of effects,” Kaufmann explains.46And the flickering movement imposed by “the lights going on and off automatically”
in the Surrealist Gallery, Kaufmann suggests, creates an equally complicated effect.47 Too shocking, the automatic feature had to be permanently switched off.
Kiesler uses techniques of distraction to focus attention on dis-parate foreground images amid a sinuous spatial field in varying ways in all of his 1940s exhibition designs. In dynamic asymmetric rhythm, individual images catch one’s focused conscious attention, and a path, delineated as a mobius strip (an endless strip), throughout the space invites the eye and in turn the body to unconsciously move about the room within a labyrinthine maze. With the eye set to distracting images of wonder, the body moves habitually – autonomically – about the galleries. Moving from image to image, from moment to moment, time merges into an expansive space. Kiesler created environments of contraction through image and of expansion through undulating surface. Individual works of art are seamed together by
the aconscious autonomic motion of the viewer moving along the path of exhibition. Content of fantastic imagery alongside the surging darkness of the room serve to support a virtual dreamlike state of surrealist awakening, where the dreaming self becomes a relaxed self, open to suggestion, among a flow of internal remembrances.
In his catalogue review of the Blood Flames Gallery exhibition, Nicholas Calas claims that both the art works and spectators become
“monads in a continuum whose lines have been traced by Kiesler’s magic wand. Pictures, statues, [and] spectators are carried by a colorbow into new situations which are to serve as starting point for . . . personal metamorpho-sis.”48 Kiesler constructs his galleries as an array of part objects seamed together in continuum. In this continuum subjects and objects meld together.
As T.J. Demos argues in his article “Duchamp’s Labyrinth,” Kiesler explicitly intends these gallery spaces to achieve a pre-linguistic unity that invokes fusion between vision and reality in order to simulate the aura of the primal maternal relationship.49
Kiesler’s galleries were the idealizations of the confines of his continuous embryonic eggshell structures designed to recreate the sensual environment of continuity with the mother. As Kiesler noted and sketched often, these galleries were conceptually intended to be the interior of his egg that encased surreal habitation within a spheroid-matrix shell. Surrounding the inhabitant in soft palpable curvilinear walls saturated with a full spectrum of lighting effects, Kiesler’s Endless House presented at the Kootz Gallery in New York, 1950, exemplifies this extreme form of surrealist dwelling.
The Endless House
In the Endless House, Kiesler’s exhibition gallery effects became psychologi-cal lighting effects, which dominate the interior atmosphere. Psychic projec-tion is delineated through a series of colored lines enveloping and generating from within the Endless House. Kiesler suggests lighting is the means to
In the Endless House, Kiesler’s exhibition gallery effects became psychologi-cal lighting effects, which dominate the interior atmosphere. Psychic projec-tion is delineated through a series of colored lines enveloping and generating from within the Endless House. Kiesler suggests lighting is the means to